Slave Systems: Ancient and Modern

Cambridge University Press, 10/28/2021
EAN 9781009113847, ISBN10: 1009113844

Paperback, 390 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English

A ground-breaking edited collection charting the rise and fall of forms of unfree labour in the ancient Mediterranean and in the modern Atlantic, employing the methodology of comparative history. The eleven chapters in the book deal with conceptual issues and different approaches to historical comparison, and include specific case-studies ranging from the ancient forms of slavery of classical Greece and of the Roman empire to the modern examples of slavery that characterised the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. The results demonstrate both how much the modern world has inherited from the ancient in regard to ideology and practice of slavery; and also how many of the issues and problems related to the latter seem to have been fundamentally similar across time and space.

Part I. Slavery, Slave Systems, World History and Comparative History
1. The study of ancient and modern slave systems
setting an agenda for comparison Enrico Dal Lago and Constantina Katsari
2. Slavery, gender, and work in the pre-modern world and early Greece
a cross-cultural analysis Orlando Patterson
3. Slavery as historical process
examples from the ancient Mediterranean and the modern Atlantic Joseph C. Miller
Part II. Economics and Technology of Ancient and Modern Slave Systems
4. The comparative economics of slavery in the Greco-Roman world Walter Scheidel
5. Slavery and technology in pre-industrial contexts Tracey Rihll
6. Comparing or interlinking? Economic comparisons of early nineteenth-century slave systems in the Americas in historical perspective Michael Zeuske
Part III. Ideologies and Practices of Management in Ancient and Modern Slavery
7. Ideal models of slave management in the Roman world and the Antebellum American South Enrico Dal Lago and Constantina Katsari
8. Panis, disciplina, et opus servo
the Jesuit ideology in Portuguese America and Greco-Roman ideas of slavery Rafael de Bivar Marquese and Fabio Duarte Joly
Part IV. Exiting Slave Systems
9. Processes of exiting the slave systems
a typology Olivier Pétrè-Grenouilleau
10. Emancipation schemes
different ways of ending slavery Stanley Engerman
Part V. Slavery and Unfree Labor, Ancient and Modern
11. Spartiates, helots, and the direction of the agrarian economy
toward an understanding of helotage in comparative perspective Stephen Hodkinson.